gorge
1yr ago
No, the unpopularity of sin/policing rhetoric isn’t due to fear of cancellation. It derives from the general loss in status of religion.
That's...the same thing.
gorge
1yr ago
Religious conservatives and sex-negative feminists both agree that casual sex in the society that exists is inherently degrading to women, that women should choose not to engage in it, and that men should be punished for engaging in it.
A problem here is that the religious conservatives who are allowed to speak in mainstream outlets under their real name have to make concessions to feminism in order to not get cancelled. So they have to argue that the real problem with feminism is that men will take advantage of women. They have trouble arguing directly that hooking up is a sin for women, a sin that many women will indulge in if allowed, and that women must be policed too, and not just men. However, these conservatives who making the socially acceptable right-wing argument, aren't actually accurately representing what the typical right-wing conservative man actually deep-down believes.
This is similar to the "Democrats are the real racists" trope that mainstream conservatives (at the National Review, etc.) get trapped in. To avoid cancellation, they can't just argue that affirmative action is bad because it is bad for whites. They have to make the argument that affirmative action is bad because it is actually bad for black people, because of "mismatch" or the "soft bigotry of low expectations" or because it won't prepare blacks for the "real world." Ultimately, these arguments do not work (the left can just extend affirmative action entirely through a person's career) and the conservative ends up just ceding the moral high ground to the left.
I’d argue that the more or less unstated promise of the Sexual Revolution to young single women was that: a) they will be sexually free without inviting social shame i.e. normalized sexual experimentation and promiscuity on their part will not have an unfavorable long-term effect on men’s attitudes towards them, and women will not sexually shame one another anymore b) they will be able to leave their constrictive gender roles to the extent they see fit, but this will not lead to social issues and anomie because men will be willing to fill those roles instead i.e. men will have no problem becoming stay-at-home dads, nurses, kindergarteners, doing housework etc.
And none of that turned out to be true.
I'd argue that these actually turned out far more true than many critics at the time would have ever imagined. Shaming against sluts has decreased dramatically, men have repressed their concerns about sexual history, men have started to do much more housework and childcare, etc.
The two great errors were:
-
The claim that sex with someone whom you were not committed to with is fun and healthy -- the claim that it is not inherently sinful/disordered/"bad for your psyche"/"bad for your soul". This claim is false -- sex is very likely to create an emotional bond, and so when you create that bond without permanent commitment a woman is setting herself up for great hurt and distress. It also makes it harder to pair-bond in the future, which makes women less likely to find or create successful marriages.
-
The claim that "consent" is the critical thing that society needs to police. Sex doesn't work that way, it originated before we could even talk, and it is simply more natural and preferable to use body language. Many women like playing a bit of cat and mouse, like giving some token resistance, and don't like being explicit. What women want is "it just happened." Meanwhile, explicitly "consensual" sex can still be traumatic or greatly regretted. It gets even worse when "consent" is expanded so that women cannot actually consent to sex with more powerful men. But this is a problem because power is something that inherently something women find attractive. So women cannot consent to men they are most attracted to? Or women can only consent to sex with men who they attracted to for reasons of the genetic lottery (looks, height), but not to men who earned their attraction by working hard and gaining status? This is all a giant mess. The "consent" framework wrongly says that society shouldn't police a handsome guy who attracts and pumps and dumps a fully consenting women. However, it should ban, say, the relationship that made my good friend's life possible (his dad was a professor, his mom a grad student on the same team, they married and had a very long, fruitful, and successful relationship). IMO, what should matter is seduction with intent to marry. I'm fine with a professor going after a grad student or a boss his secretary, but if he wins her heart he better marry her.
They are treating school decisions as very short term, zero-sum games which in a sense they are.
It was actually a negative sum game. Especially by the 70s, the whites were not actually hoarding any resources. So when you forced integration you made schools terrible for the whites because the kids were getting assaulted and the teachers were distracted by teaching students who were at a lower grade level, and you made the schools no better for the black kids. The forced integration made things worse for everyone in ways that were obvious and predictable, but the people pushing it were so inflamed by self-righteousness that they did not care, it was those leaders pushing integration who were morally in the wrong.
harmful to assume it's all just zero-sum and instead should be seeking out more effective solutions.
Like what? You don't just get to advocate for a situation where girls were getting sexually assaulted in the halls and then say, "well, they should have figured some other solution and then we wouldn't have to forced integration" and then get to take the moral high ground. Let's be very clear here because the rest is just window dressing: deliberately creating a situation where education is impossible because of kids constantly being assaulted and bullied is morally wrong, all the time, in every society. The situation created by forced integration was worse, and the people responsible were morally in the wrong, far more in the morally wrong than the people who supported the segregated status quo.
It's morally wrong, all the time, in every society, to treat people worse for some arbitrary reason before you get to know them.
"Arbitrary" and "treat worse" are tricky here. It is morally wrong to overtly mean or aggressive against someone who has not wronged you. However, it is morally permissible to withhold charity, or withhold generosity, or withhold sharing, or withhold your friendship, or withhold permitting someone to migrate into your terrirtory, or withold wanting your children to raise my children (which is what school is) based upon limited, imperfect information -- such as ethnicity/race, or religion, or politics. Race, like family, or like in many cases religion, is not something a person chooses to be born into, but it is not exactly arbitrary either. Race is tribe, it is a measure of closeness of blood relations, it is not arbitrary, and something that is quite often relevant.
gorge
1yr ago
It is rather annoying how certain activists have destroyed the meaning of the word....Genuine "I hate X race" type people can now get relatively far in politics
Eh, good riddance. Anyone who has is acting in morally deplorable ways relating to race can be condemned in language and terms and concepts that long predate the word "racism." Just call out what they are actually doing that is bad -- whether it is being slanderous, committing detraction, or covetous or whatever the bad thing actually is.
Meanwhile, as I read more history, I find that a lot of the "classic" racism that was universally abhorred before the "great awokening" (for instance school segregration) was not as clearly wrong as I thought it was. Read for instance Wolter's The Burden of Brown. I don't blame the white parents of any school district from using whatever laws they had at their disposal to keep their school from being overrun by a population with much higher rates of committing assault and with entirely different cultural norms and with incompatible levels of pedagogical needs.
"Racism" is an anti-concept. It is a word of activist power. It groups a whole bunch of unlike phenomena together, and then the people who can use the word can equivocate on the definition in order to target the people they want to target for shaming and cancellation.
An example of the game plan is:
- Create an association in the public between the word "racist" and images of white people throwing stones at black children and calling them horrible names.
- Include in the definition of a racist "a person who believes in the superiority of one racial group, such as a group being more intelligent"
- Then using that definition, call people like Charles Murray or Steve Sailer "racists" since he arguably fits definition 2) even though they are the farthest thing from definition 1).
- Cancel Charles Murray and Steve Sailer, since their ideas are a huge threat to the $2 trillion dolllar education-industrial complex.
Another way of saying this is that "racism" is any idea that opposes the current left/center-left establishment ethnogensis or ethno-preservation projects. So if you are against busing ethnic Polish and Irish white kids to black neighborhood schools, you are against a certain ethnogensis project, and therefore racist. If you are against historically black universities, or against a law making certain hair styles a protected characteristic, you are against a certain ethnology-preservation project and therefore racist. If an asian-American mom wants her daughter to marry an Asian guy, that is irrelevant to any establishment plans, so the establishment does not care and does not consider the mom a racist.
gorge
1yr ago
and I've observed enough of the latter that I think c-secs are far less annoying or painful, even if you opt for an epidural.
Except with a c-section the woman is not back to normal for many weeks, as they have to cut through her skin and muscle to get at the uterus, and that has to heal. Meanwhile if all goes well with vaginal birth, the woman can be almost completely back to normal and fully active in a matter of days.
Also, with every c-section scar tissue builds up, which inhibits future pregnancies, meaning if you want to have more than 2 or 3 kids, intentionally scheduling a c-section is a bad idea.
gorge
1yr ago
It was literally the standard common book of prayer up until 1928. And "wife has a duty to obey" was the standard Christian, Hewbrew, and Roman teaching, so that is a span from 700BC to AD 1928. So which viewpoint is bizarre? OK, but we have cool modern technology now! We have indoor toilets now! Why should we take the norms of the past seriously? On the other hand ... technology was progressing from 700BC to AD 1928. Are things progressing now? At the same rate? The same second derivative?
gorge
1yr ago
What do you mean by "fully sovereign" in this context? In what sense are the current generation of men "sovereign?"
Most modern men are slaves by historical standards. A "sovereign man" or perhaps more accurately a "free man" is able to both obtain the means of sustenance by building and trading and interacting with society, and physically can protect what he has from predation. Remember, the idea that police are the frontline protection against predation is very new. In older times, a free man was much more responsible for physically protecting his own liberty and property.
What to you mean by "owned" in this context? Do you have any anectotes about this?
A book could be written on this. The term "owned" isn't quite right, the husband-wife relationship is sui genersis so inherently it needs its own word. But for one example -- women will boundary test (like children) (also known in PUA as shit test or fitness test), all women will boundary test, and they like it if you pass the test and are deeply uncomfortable if they fail. An wife ultimately wants to rely on you as her rock, and as part of that is having enough of a sense of command to do what is good for her, not always what she says she wants at the time.
gorge
1yr ago
Out of curiosity, are you married?
Yes. To a girl I met in college, who was an NPR liberal, who did not vow to obey me. But, she does accept my lead and gets deeply uncomfortable if I do not lead like a traditional male, if I do not act as a rock upon which my family relies. As an infamous crimethinker once said (paraphrasing since I can't find the exact quote: "Every successful modern marriage is secretly imitating a 17th century trad marriage" He exaggerates ... slightly.
returning half the human species to the status of property to restore?
It is my observation and studied opinion that:
- Women have enormous natural power because they have the power to make men immortal.
- Men inherently do not like to see the women they live like unhappy. It is my experience, my observation, and I don't have it on hand, but I remember seeing some study that a husband's happiness was very correlated with his wife's happiness, but not vice-versa. Or going back to the patriarchal age or Biblical proverbs: "It is better to live in a corner of the housetop, than in a house shared with a contentious woman."
- Women, like children, do not have the capability, physical or psychological, to be fully sovereign over themselves.
- Women, like children, actually like to be owned by a father/husband.
Feminists say that feminism "is the radical idea that women are human." Well it's more like feminism is the radical idea that women are men, that is, they thrive in having the same social and legal situation as men do (1). And that is not true -- it is fantasy-based argument that does tremendous harm to men and women alike. Women are their own thing, not men, not children.
So even if women, have little legal power, they retain tremendous power to bend men to their will, and to extract the means of a happy and fulfilling life.
And since women can never be self-sovereign, they are either wards of their fathers, wards of their family, wards of their husband, wards of the state bureacracy, or temporary wards of a rotating array of characters (their boss, their boyfriend). eg. I believe that only fathers and husbands have the knowledge and alignment of interest to actually take care of women in the best possible way.
(1) Actually, feminism is more like calvinball where women alternatively get treated as men, sometimes indeed as super-men, or sometimes as agency-free, angelic, children (eg, when they argue women shouldn't be made to publicly testify in college sexual assault cases, they should just be believed)
gorge
1yr ago
He may not have put through every trad dream policy,
He hasn't done anything close to what was required. If we were ranking societies on a scale of 1 to 10, 1 being the most feminist society in history, 10 being the patriarchy of 5th century Rome, I'd put the Ango-America in the 1700s as a 9, America circa 1900 as a 6, America in the 1950s as a 4, and Russia and the U.S. in 2023 as around a 1. Whether Russia is 1.3 and America is 1.1 and Sweden is 1.0 isn't a big difference. Maybe Putin moved the needle for Russia from 1.3 to 1.4. Maybe he didn't move the needle at all, his actions did not even do enough to arrest entropy decay and the continual allure of American hegemonic culture, and so Russia still went from a 1.5 to 1.3 during is reign.
So why should anyone take seriously the thesis that feminism is responsible for X bad thing in modern society, if there's no way to test it?
For the same reason anyone takes any argument about social or historical trends convincing -- they find some combination of imperfect statistical correlations, personal life experiences, historical testimonies, circumstantial evidence, reasoned arguments, etc. etc. to be convincing.
120 years ago, in 1900, the American birthrate had already been halved since 1800. Was that also feminism's fault?
It probably did have a major impact. America became substantially more feminist during the 1800s -- coverture was ended, the first states had already granted woman's suffrage. By 1918 Mencken was already complaining in his In Defense of Women that women had legally seized the upper-hand. Robert Dabney wrote in 1871 about northern conservatives caving on womens rights. In 1886, Henry Adams was satirizing feminism in Boston. You can play Wikipedia game and note how few children the notable 1800s feminists bore. Here is an interesting article making the argument that birth rates dropped earliest in the regions that were first hit by englightenment/feminist values, notably: France and New England.
gorge
1yr ago
I definitely wouldn't argue that it was a breach of fiduciary duty - under the circumstances in the Fedex story that argument would be a loser in both England and Delaware that would definitely lose in court because of the business judgement rule.
I assume, though, that the gambling was done under his own name? If he lost the money in gambling, he might have a tough time proving to a jury that he intended to give the winnings back to the company. He would have to prove that he really was gambling on behalf of the company, rather than embezzling the money to himself and gambling it on behalf of himself, that might be tough to do.
because you won't admit to any control
Yes, that is what I said very clearly my original post that I linked to. There is no control group.
and life back then was worse on every metric I can think of.
1950s America was massively less feminist than any white or east asian country today, and was a pretty nice place to live, a better place by many metrics. And to the extent things are better in 2023, it is mostly because of technological development, but the pace of technological development was greater in the 1950s, the nice things we have in 2023 are built on the groundwork of things discovered in earlier times, I do not think you can give feminism any credit for the nicer technological things we have in 2023 than we had in 1950.
This is like marxists who insist the reason USSR/China/Cuba/etc. failed to create a communist utopia is because they just didn't do communism hard enough. Maybe.
AFACIT, Putin did not substantially change policy at all. Did he enact something like the Hayes code for all TV and movies in Russia? Did he restrict women from going to college? Did he ban no fault divorce? Did he restrict single women from living alone? Did he add "honor and obey" to all legal marriage vows? How much money did he actually allocate toward pro-traditional Christian values media? Did he make being a member of a church in good standing a prerequisite for elite positions? Did he ban abortion? Did he ban birth control? These are things that were the norm in America 70-120 years ago, such policy changes are what it would actually mean to roll-back feminism.
gorge
1yr ago
Whether they're extremely feminist by historical standards doesn't matter. If feminism (or social liberalism in general) is what causes worse social outcomes, then more feminist/liberal countries should do worse than less feminist/liberal countries now.
No, because of range restriction. Height matters for basketball, but if you do a correlation between NBA statistical success and height, there is no correlation. That is because everyone has already been selected based on height. Every country today is hyper-feminist, the actual differences between them in amount of feminism is small, so when comparing metrics like fertility rate or mental illness, other factors will matter more.
What are the metrics by which ROK is more feminist than the US or western Europe
Compared to the US, the UN Gender Inequality Index and ROK has actually had a woman president and the US has not. Compared to Western Europe, I suspect that ROK women, particularly single women, work far more hours in the office than American women. I suspect ROK has more of a princess culture, but I don't know how I would prove this to your satisfaction, it's not something that anyone reputable tracks and quantifies. There are many forms of feminism, "princess culture" is one form, Russian style gold-digging is another, girl-boss, strong bad-ass woman type is another. Countries are feminist in different ways.
Russia is a particularly good example since, as you note in this post, Putin's government has made a big show of retvrning to tradition, revitalizing the Orthodox Church, and opposing the degenerate west, and yet he can't keep the fertility rate from continuing to crash or the kids from becoming atheist.
He made a show but he did not actually do much of anything. Russia went full communist in 1918, and had 70 years during which it was way to the left on religious and feminist issues than the USA. It never actually recovered from that.
gorge
1yr ago
Generally the Church will use the phrase "people struggling with same-sex attraction" to refer to people who have same-sex attraction but are trying their best not to actually acting on it and engage in homosexual activity. Such people are welcome in the church, welcome to take communion, and if they screw up and engage in same sex activity they just need to confess and try do better in the future, they aren't excommunicated for sinning. However, if they take "pride" in homosexuality activity, that is an open rejection of doctrine and living scandalously, so that is not welcome in the church.
In the broader culture, "homosexual" basically means "same-sex attracted and unapologetically acting on it." However there are some liberal Catholics who will equivocate/motte-and-bailey on this, saying things like, "the Church should welcome homosexuals" which to the public makes it seem like they want to the Church to change doctrine, but then when pressed on it by conservative Catholics they will fall back and say, "well homosexual just means same-sex attracted, it does not mean they are actually sinning."
gorge
1yr ago
It probably seems confusing to outsiders, but the question, "Maybe there is some sort of blessing we can give to a same sex couple who asks for one?" is not the same thing as, "A same sex couple can contract a sacramental marriage." A blessing is not the same thing as a sacrament.
There are liberal Catholics who have suggested this, but the rebuttal is convincing to me. A "gay marriage" is inherently scandalous. We all know that it means these the couple are engaged in an amorous/erotic relationship with each other, not a fraternal/brotherly/sisterly/friendship relationship. If two men said to a priest, "we have committed to be lifelong friends/bondsmen/blood brothers/partners, can you bless our vows of permanent friendship to each other" obvious there would be no issues. No, we all know "LGB" means same-sex eroticism. Since that is the common understanding, blessing a "gay marriage" is blessing sin and blessing scandal and that is something that a Catholic priest should not do. Now the liberal Catholics have also suggested, "Well they shouldn't bless the relationship itself, but the good in it." To me, this is just sophistry and ridiculous hair-splitting. The fact remains the priest is giving the impression of blessing sin. But it is perhaps the viewpoint Francis takes.
What I think Francis's statements amount to is that he is not going to change Church teaching, or formally create a policy of blessing gay marriages, but he is also not going to police and discipline priests who are bending doctrine and somehow claiming to be blessing elements of good in same-sex relationships.
gorge
1yr ago
South Korea, Japan, and Russia that are more socially conservative than the US and western Europe on every metric.
Malarkey. All of these countries are extremely feminist by historical American standards, and by some metrics are more feminist than contemporary America. For example, South Korea ranked 10th in the world in the UN's Gender Inequality Index, which is far higher than where America ranked. I wrote a long effort post on this last year and part 2 and part 3
gorge
1yr ago
Like... we've had gay marriage for decades now, no one got turned into pillars of salt or anything, seems like empirically it works about as well as straight marriage for families and for raising kids, and even for church membership at accepting churches.
Marriage has been hit by a quadruple whammy over the last 150+ years:
- Replacement of asymmetric vows/obligations (the woman vows to obey) with asexual vows. Ending of the legal privileges of father/husband.
- No-fault divorce
- Normalization and even encouragement of sex-outside of marriage by high production value media
- Gay marriage
All of these things happened gradually and culture often lagged legal changes, so it is difficult to correlate the damage done with the change in policy. However, overall marriage has been completely hollowed out, and as a result we have seen a dramatic rise in broken families and mental illness. "Gay marriage" was more the final nail in the coffin than it was the decisive blow.
The biggest thing I've noticed about the post-Obergefell world is that it now seems political incorrect/taboo to say that "man-woman" marriage is better or the norm. Children are not born knowing that man-woman marriage is better than other arrangements, they must be taught that. But the post-Obergefell world, or official institutions like schools or children's TV programming cannot teach man-woman as the norm. And we see in surveys things like 50% of young women identifying as non-straight, or under 40% of young people responding in surveys that marriage and kids are important life goals, and we also see very high rates of mental illness among young liberal women. We have lost our ability in as a society to model what a default good life should be, and kids are making poor choices and ending up with mental health problems. And yes, the absysmally low (and highly dysgenic) fertility rates will result in an end of civilization if nothing changes.
gorge
1yr ago
FedEx for example where the CEO literally doubled down with their last remaining $5000 in Las Vegas to turn it into a much needed $27,000 to keep the business alive. In this timeline FedEx is legitimate, but if it hadn't worked out he could've possibly gone to jail.
Probably not fraud, since the investors have given the CEO broad discretion to spend and risk company funds in order to generate a return, with the expectation that they may lose it all. (As opposed to FTX customers who had not delegated any such discretion to FTX) Nor was the CEO was the making the gamble for any personal gain. (As opposed to FTX lending funds to SBF's other firm, Alameda).
As far as I can tell Uber was based on complete fraud. Its business plan from day one appeared to be: completely ignore taxi laws the world over and just push out a product that was so much better than calling taxis that before jurisdictions knew what was happening they would have tons of passionate users that would be furious if Uber was taken away.
I don't see the fraud here.
It is an interesting case -- what is going on is that Uber is facilitating the rampant commission of misdemeanor/summary violations of municipal codes. This reminds me of how Google maps will send notifications if there is a speed trap coming up. I'm not actually sure who would be responsible for trying to indict Uber, and what actual statute they would cite as Uber having violated.
The primary question I keep coming back to, and I come to this every time there's a large corporate fraud scandal, is: what is fraud, actually? Because it seems indistinguishable from "I thought our business was legit and every indication I had was that it was legit and then it failed and it failed really hard and lots of people lost money".
With crypto, there are certainly gray areas where the customer knows the company is taking risks, knows the assets are risky, but is not fully aware of just how much risk the company is taking, and the company is happy to keep the customer unaware by burying the risks in the fine print.
But this is not the case of FTX. FTX is just run-of-the-mill embezzlement.
FTX said in its terms of service that customer deposits were the property of the customer, were fully controlled by the customer, were not the assets of FTX, and would not be loaned out. FTX was acting as a custodian. Instead, FTX took the customer funds and gambled with them. This is analogous to a bank manager who is dealing with too many failing loans and so drills into people's safe deposit boxes, takes the money and gambles it at a casino. He cannot do that, that is theft, he needs accept bankruptcy, let the those who lent and invested in the bank to take losses, but allow everyone who trusted the bank as a custodian to pick up their own assets from their safe deposit boxes.. It seems like FTX also took the funds and sent them to SBF's other business (Alambeda), which is even more obvious and blatant theft. This is classic, go-directly-to-jail do not pass go crime.
gorge
1yr ago
Affirmative action is "unlawful", but what exactly is the penalty if someone discriminates on the basis of race?
Well, civil rights law suits against institutions that result in that institution paying large monetary damages have long been a thing. So presumably going forward Harvard can no longer use "targetting diversity" as a defense against such suits?
It's a little curious to me that there was no monetary judgement attached to this case. When a company like coca-cola or Tesla is judged as having acted in a discriminatory manner, they face hundreds of millions of dollars in damages. So why was there no monetary judgement in this Harvard case?
Locke was wrong.
Yarvin had a great quote: "Property is peace." Possession and the physical power to enforce possession are fundamental properties of reality. "Property rights" are a formalization of possession. "Property" is an agreement to write down and legitimize possession, and say that going forward property can only be transferred according to the rules (which in most cases means according to the consent of the existing owner) and not according to violence.
For someone to say, "these property rights are illegitimate" is fundamentally akin to the person saying, "I renounce the peaceful status quo; I choose war."
When formal property rights are entirely out-of-whack with the reality of possession (the case of an absentee landlord and squatters living on the land for years), that is a recipe for friction and conflict. There is no one way under natural law in which such conflicts must be resolved. Societies just have to muddle through, and usually they develop some sort of concept of adverse possession and statues of limitations.
Would the descendants of the original unfortunate couple be wrong to want to overthrow their society and redistribute the land and other resources of society more fairly and justly?
This would constitute choosing war against the existing legal regime. Can rebellion against authority ever be just? Yes, but only in dire situations. Is it in this case? I don't know, only the people involved have enough information to decide. Here is how one moral guide (the Catechism of the Catholic Church) discusses the criteria for violent opposition to existing political authority:
Armed resistance to oppression by political authority is not legitimate, unless all the following conditions are met: 1) there is certain, grave, and prolonged violation of fundamental rights; 2) all other means of redress have been exhausted; 3) such resistance will not provoke worse disorders; 4) there is well–founded hope of success; and 5) it is impossible reasonably to foresee any better solution.
Pope John XXIII in an encyclical enumerated some of these fundamental rights:
"We must speak of man's rights. Man has the right to live. He has the right to bodily integrity and to the means necessary for the proper development of life, particularly food, clothing, shelter, medical care, rest, and, finally, the necessary social services. In consequence, he has the right to be looked after in the event of ill health; disability stemming from his work; widowhood; old age; enforced unemployment; or whenever through no fault of his own he is deprived of the means of livelihood."
So they might be justified in rebellion. However, the rebellion would be justified not because the property rights were originally illegitimate, but because the current political status quo was depriving them of the means necessary for the proper development of life.
EDIT: if this island example is supposed to be analogy for blacks in America, I would say rebellion in the current year clearly flunks all five of the above tests for legitimacy.
”The world still does not know it, but everyone is invited to the supper of the wedding of the Lamb (Re 19:9). To be admitted to the feast all that is required is the wedding garment of faith which comes from the hearing of his Word (cf. Ro 10:17).”
The charitable interpretation of is that "wearing the wedding garment of faith" of course entails the things that faith in Christ and faith in the Catholic Church entails, that it entails righteous deeds, following Church discipline, purification, repentance, etc. It seems silly to require the Pope to explicitly say everything that faith entails every single time he talks of the importance of faith. Certainly Saint Paul did not so do. And yes, a bishop is required to interpret fellow Catholics charitably and only make accusations of heresy as a last recourse.
Now, in context, is this statement easy to misinterpret? Yes. Did Pope Francis purposely state things in an ambiguous way to try to nudge bishops into being less strict about denying communion? Perhaps. But as a bishop, Strickland needs to interpret the letter charitably and limit is criticism to warning about possible misinterpretations of the letter -- he should not straight accuse the Pope of teaching heresy. If you care, you can listen to a more thorough analysis of these letters from Michael Lofton.
Exactly. Since America conquered achieved world hegemony after World War II, the Catholic Church leadership have wanted to avoid cancellation (ie, losing non-profit status, having Catholics being auto-excluded from being members of the bar, being dis-invited from all establishment media, and also Catholics just generally not wanting to seem like fuddy-duddy "bad guys" by the standards of progressive morality, etc. etc.) and so have tried to put a more modern/feminist spin on long-standing teachings. So in the past 60 years, the Catholic Church has emphasized the angle of "we are actually the real feminists because sexual sin is a case of men hurting women,"
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